Joint Managing Director of Triad Advertising (Pvt) Ltd, Varuni Amunugama Fernando lashed out yesterday at a post- Chillie’s press conference stating that the new 'metal tally' implemented this year would hinder the growth of small scale agencies.“It is a shame that this year the boards decided to bring in a tally table instead of going forward with the usual Olympic system of winning,” said Varuni, “at its inception Chillies stood out as an equal ground for small agencies to promote themselves and come up in their standards while competing with bigger agencies. But with this metal tally you can hope to see less of those small scale agencies competing, and Chillies would be a ground for large scale agencies to compete with each other.”

Backing Varuni Joint Managing Director of Triad Advertising (Pvt) Ltd, Dilith Jayaweera stated that the new system came as an absolute shock to Triad personals.  “The tally table system came as surprising shock at the last minute as we were not aware of this new system,” he said. “Even though we take full responsibility in not attending Blueprint meetings and respect the decisions made by the industry, we also have suggestions and observations and will submit it in writing in the near future.” Varuni also went on to say that initially when the Olympic system was introduced to Chillies (most amount of Gold’s win) Triad was against it but it was conducted somehow. Furthermore she added that usually such a matter should be well discussed with all agencies. “Typically Blueprint decisions and other events are passed on by e-mail in keeping with the modern technology. However, we did not receive any information stating that the tally system has been changed,” she said adding, “This is a fundamental change and we do not agree with it. Usually in such a case agencies should meet and agree and disagree which we were not aware of anyway.”

Laila Gunasekere Martenstyn, President of the 4 A’s objecting the remarks stating that after much complaints regarding the Olympic style win after last year’s Chillies, the idea of a tally table was “unofficially” put across to the Boards by herself. The Olympic system was decided against as that system is subjected to Gold, Silver and Bronze in every category, whereas at Chillies some categories could go without any placing and certain categories could have multiple gold’s and no Silver and Bronze.  “It was met without any objections and we decided to put it across to the Blueprint Committee, where it was again met without much objections,” alleged Laila.

However objecting her statement, Chief Executive Officer of JWT, Thayalan Bartlett said that there ‘were’ many objections raised. “There were many protests against the tally table. JWT was one of the many agencies who voted against it, but with the agreement of the majority the tally table idea was passed.” Nevertheless, he stated that many objections were raised in spite of Laila’s protests that there weren’t any and stated that he has many emails to prove it as well.

JWT, which managed to claim 5 Gold’s out of the nine given at Chillies would have walked away as the winning agency if the previous Olympic system was adhered by this year as well. The agency managed to win 13 awards out of the 23 entered recoding a more than 50% win. Executive Creative Director and Vice President of JWT Chandini Rajaratnam stated that even though they were not even in the rankings the past few years, in the history of Chillies it was the first time an agency won 5 Gold’s and Best of Show in one go. “It was the dedication, commitment and the innovativeness, even by breaking the rules that we were able to produce the winning entries,” she said.

The Agency of the Year, Leo Burnett scooped the most number of points due to the culmination of hard work of the 10 year old agency, said Managing Director of Leo Burnett Solutions Inc, Ranil De Silva. “Being at the top at the Chillies 2009 is an outstanding achievement,” said he.

Triad, the 100% local ad agency is said to be submitting two of their major projects to the Cannes Advertising Festival this year. Going with the theme ‘Api- Sri Lanka can’ Triad is now ready to step up to the international field. “The very positive confidence derived by the panel of international judges encouraged us to submit our entry and we hope to reach out to the international arena in the future as well,” said Joint MD of Triad Advertising (Pvt) Ltd, Dilith Jayaweera.

Chillies 2009 is finally over, but the controversies still burn as usual. At the beginning of Chillies ‘09 the controversies plagued over the Bates withdrawal with the committees decision in inviting Sonal Dabral, the Chairman of Bates India and Regional Executive Creative Director of Bates’ network, to be a foreign judge. Also last few years issues were raised due to scam ads that took part in the Chillies. It would be interesting to see the final outcome of Varuni’s out lashing as they stuck by their version of not being informed until the very last moment and that Blueprint Committee would be notified shortly on their disapproval.